Anybody else scared of this?

cm burns

Electronic voting machines...and not because of Florida, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, disenfranchised black voters, Diebold's established finanical support of Republicans, or any other reason to flame a liberal person like myself. What scares me the most is that local officials from ANY PARTY can tamper with the vote. With no paper trail, crooked Dems and Repubs at the local level would be free to tamper with the vote without any check on the system.

cm burns

"Which is why all electronic voting machines should provide hard paper records of all votes as they happen."

Do you mean that the voter should get something like a "voting receipt?" Or do you mean the machines print out the records for the officials? Or something else?

The scary thing about this program is that changes can be made to the votes before there would even be a chance to create or print off a paper copy. Towards the end of the study/article they were able to tamper with a large amount of votes with ease, and then erase any record of tampering just as easy. This is the voting program which will be used in November, and any local election official could change a large amount of votes.

"But any way you slice it, if officials are trying to gyp some people of their votes, they're going to find a way. So while this does present new challenges, in broader terms its nothing new."

I agree with this in principle i.e. the crooks will be crooks, but this program allows for changing a HUGE number of votes with little effort. If the move to electronic voting is an attempt at election reform, the only thing I see here is that taxpayer dollars have been wasted to make the problem worse. I would rather have paper ballots...at least they can be hand recounted.